Month: January 2016

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.

David Bowie nearly ruined my marriage. Or more accurately, David Bowie very nearly caused my marriage to never be.

Back in the late 80’s, when I was still in college, I went to see David Bowie at Tampa Stadium. It was part of his “Glass Spider” tour, and it was magnificent. I went with my roommate’s girlfriend — she loved Bowie, he did not — but everyone involved understood this was just two friends going to a concert, nothing more. Well, almost everyone — more on that later.

At the show, on a lark, we bought matching T-shirts, and changed into them immediately. We both liked the same design, and didn’t really care what anyone thought about it. Plus we though it would be kinda funny when we caught up with the rest of “the gang” after the show.

I was looking forward to catching up with the gang after the show, because Kathy (you know her today as Kat) was going to be there. She was the friend of the girlfriend of a different roommate. We had met twice before, several months prior, under complicated circumstances when neither of us were available, but that had all changed since then, for both of us.

What no one in our little gang, myself included, had thought of, was this: Kat had never met my roommate’s girlfriend, and nobody thought to tell her who she was, or more importantly, whose girlfriend she was.

I don’t remember exactly where we were all meeting after the show, but I think it was the bowling alley. In any case, in we burst, wearing matching T-shirts, and absolutely exuberant from having witnessed one of the best concerts ever in the history of rock-and-roll.

Kat, in the absence of any contradictory information, immediately assumed this girl was MY girlfriend. Me, with my keen and highly tuned observational skills, noticed something was amiss about two hours later. I thought I was just off my game. Weak though it usually was, I did have some game. I had no idea I had literally cock-blocked myself.

It took several weeks, plus some well timed smooching and kanoodling on the part of my roommate and his girlfriend, to convince Kat that this girl and I were not involved, had never been involved, and would never be involved. During this time she convinced me that the matching T-shirt idea had been a terribly grievous error in judgment on my part, despite any assertions to the contrary on my part. But, convince we did, and after those several weeks we were firmly back on track to becoming the happy couple you know today.

Still, that was an amazing concert. So thank you for that, David Bowie!